A lot of changes were made in the expansions to ensure that graphics were rendered more easily and the entire game was altered so that it runs on a smaller footprint, therefore the newer expansions are no longer the resource hogging monsters that the original was.

You may want to run the updates as some of the alterations were released in the updates and this may well assist the issue you are having.

FYI Twilight of the Arnor is one of the smoothest games i have run and even with huge amounts of planets and ships i get little to no time lagging until very late in the game.

Best of luck in your games

The answer to your question is twofold: Each chapter has its own updates and both SDC and Impulse are smart enough to give the game the appropriate updates.  However, changes that are made to TA aren't necessarily made to DA, and are almost certainly not made to DL, because they are three different codebases.

So, yes, update.  If the problem persists, we'll be here.

I just updated every component using Stardock Central, a very well-done interface that makes it easy to update games for a change.

Little to no progress however, I really think something is wrong, I mean I can understand the first game not being completely up to par with its expansions but just to give you an idea, even the Stardock logo you see for a few seconds when starting the game is sluggish in Dread Lords and smooth in Dark Avatar.  Same for the introduction video but I guess one could argue there are more or less frames in one or the other so that's why I decided to use the Stardock video as a benchmark and blatant example of side by side games, one working perfectly and the other running as if on a 386.

Of course, I have the option to give up on Dread Lords and start with Dark Avatar but I'd like to learn the game without the asteroid fields, super abilities and all that stuff first.

-Marco

Sorry for not mentioning my O.S. but I didn't want to start listing my pedigree in case in was a well-known issue.  I am indeed running Windows Vista but even the latest update to DL didn't fix it.

Believe it or not, I disabled SLi on a wild guess and it worked!  Day and night difference, I'm telling you!  Now I can enjoy Dread Lords smoothly, thanks to everyone who helped!

-Marco